Members of the court councils (the recently established governing body of the courts, composed of court presidents, deputy court presidents and court chancellors) of all first instance courts of Albania, representatives of the High Court and of the High Judicial Council of Albania attended on 9 February 2024 a workshop on CEPEJ tools concerning court efficiency and quality of justice.

One of the workshop sessions was dedicated to good practices in introducing and implementing CEPEJ tools in courts’ daily work, particularly the guide for a unified methodology for collection of the judicial data developed under the previous phase of the action, and applying CEPEJ performance indicators to monitor court’s efficiency. Representatives of the “Dashboard Western Balkans” action presented the latest data available for Albania and insisted on the importance of statistics collected on courts level for effective decision making and for ensuring a quality data on national level.

Two other workshop sessions focused on the use of court users’ satisfaction surveys to improve the quality of justice services and on tools on judicial time management from the perspective of court administration.

The event also served as an opportunity to discuss and exchange on the findings from the series of trainings organized with the non-judge staff of all first instance courts in 2023 and on sharing good practices developed by different courts.

Following the workshop, beneficiary institutions and court presidents attended the second Steering Committee of the action, taking note on the progress for the first year of implementation and approving the plan of activities for the upcoming months.

This activity was jointly organised by CEPEJ actions in the region, namely , the regional action “Towards a better evaluation of the results of judicial reforms in the Western Balkans – Dashboard Western Balkans“ and the SEJ IV action “Strengthening the Quality and Efficiency of Justice in Albania (SEJ IV)” in the framework of the European Union/Council of Europe joint programme Horizontal Facility for the Western Balkans and Türkiye (Horizontal Facility III), co-funded by the European Union and the Council of Europe and implemented by the Council of Europe.